


Crack It

by digitalduckie



Series: Falloutverse: The Man in Black [3]
Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 4
Genre: Explicit Language, Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Injury Recovery, M/M, References to Drugs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-15
Updated: 2018-03-15
Packaged: 2019-03-31 14:14:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,090
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13976832
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/digitalduckie/pseuds/digitalduckie
Summary: Royce likes to invest in others and while out on a 'field trip' with Redeye, he decides to teach him a skill.





	Crack It

Somewhere west, just outside of the city, was a shed. If you could even call it that. It was just large enough for a couple of planters and a counter top and outside were a couple of tables to greet customers. They had seen it on their way in to town and Royce even chatted up the clerk with a sly purchase of some chems from under the counter while Redeye pocketed a few apples for the road. But when the two had finished their time at the library and started back out of town, they found the clerk dead.

All the caps were gone, much to Royce's disappointment, and only a couple of half empty bottles of Day Tripper indicated any previous stocking of chems. But he seemed more meticulous about searching the floorboards and Redeye grew irritated when he was instructed to help push the counter aside.

"Face it, Boss. Someone beat us to it." Redeye halfheartedly leaned against the edge of the counter with his good hand and considered the apples he had taken on their first go-around. He'd much rather eat one in the corner while Royce did his thing and why shouldn't he? After all the shit that went down at the library, he deserved to relax.

"Doubtful."

"You said it yourself. All the caps are gone and the only vegetables left are the spoiled ones. What else-"

"Stomp your foot." Royce waited with a patient stare for Redeye to comply. So, he did. It must have been a joke to see exactly what he could be told to do.

"Now I guess you want me to clap my hands or some shit?"

"No. I want you to fucking listen." Royce taped his heel against the floorboards just twice and this time Redeye noticed the way the sound had a dull echo. His eyes darted up to meet Royce's and the smirk across his face.

"Now, again, help me push this counter out of the way and this time use your shoulder or else you'll pull your hand open again."

"You're the one that cut it!"

"And the one that paid the doctor's bill to get it stitched up." With a grunt, Royce still put in the bulk of the effort and within a few inches, the two found what they were after.

Under the counter had been concealed a small trap door, scuffed and marred across its face and lacking a proper handle. Unprompted, Redeye drew his pipe pistol as Royce squatted to the side, prying the door up and open toward himself and exposing Redeye to whoever might lay in wait inside. There were no shots fired, however. Only a musky darkness barely fractured by tiny streams of whatever sunlight filtered in between the floorboards of the shop.

"Well." Royce dusted his hands and patted Redeye on the back. "After you, please."

"You can't be serious."

"My tongue is often kept in my cheek, I'll admit, but yes, I'm serious." Royce's smile was that of mocking gratitude. Never leave home without your meat shield.

With a sigh, Redeye reluctantly sat on the floor, one leg over the edge and then the other before letting himself slide off and into the space below. He landed less gracefully than he would have liked and immediately upon regaining his balance, he swept his pistol side to side as if he could even see any targets. A resounding nothing came upon him and when he looked back up for Royce, he half expected to see the door being slid back into place. Instead, the other man was climbing in for himself, bending lower at the knees as he landed yet smoothly recovering to stand upright. Unlike Redeye, his head could clear the beams holding the floorboards above them. Barely.

"What is this? Some kind of cellar?" He had heard some raiders laugh about finding people cowering in crawl spaces of their homes before. Redeye fancied himself as more of a highwayman, however, and wasn't as prone to targeting a homestead of any sort.

"If you take the time to look through a shop or restaurant still standing in, say, downtown Boston perhaps, you might find a cellar like this, yes. They were handy for storing goods and supplies in crowded urban areas where buildings could only expand on the vertical plain." Royce nodded, flicking open his lighter and casting it about the space.

It was only about as big as the shack itself and aside from some support beams, primarily dirt. Someone had apparently started a tunnel on the west side though when Redeye threw a rock into it, it clattered against what he presumed was the moderately shallow back wall. Royce stepped past a few moldy and disintegrating boxes, torn, collapsed, and shuffled about to spill their rotten contents about the floor. Junk. All of it. Old papers, plastic cups, empty cans. Pure and simple garbage. Perhaps the only remotely useful thing were a set of grided crates that could have held jars of preserves or bottles of some sort.

"This is a waste of time." They were raiders, not scavengers. Royce ignored him as he made his way to the corner.

"Bingo."

"What?"

Royce tossed a few boxes aside haphazardly and Redeye had to dodge at least one of them. He was beginning to wonder exactly what sort of person the raiders at Nuka World had brought on as their new overboss. What a raw deal to end up going from Colter, a lazy and egotistical asshole, to a literal garbage man from the South. He had half a mind to climb out of the space and walk back to the parks to personally tell Gage they were finding someone new.

"This is why you don't underestimate the occasional side-trip." Royce wiped dust off the top of a free standing safe before giving it a hearty pat. "Do you know how to crack these things?"

"How did you know-?"

"That it was here? I didn't. More than nine times out of ten you won't find much of anything if you go diving in ruins, but that fraction of a chance can really be worth the effort."

"Someone's probably already gotten into it." Redeye ducked down and examined the combination dial on the front. The safe itself was at an angle that surely hadn't been its owner's original intention. "There's probably nothing inside."

"Probably. But then not everyone knows how to get inside. So, how about it?" Redeye looked up at the man with a slight frown. Sometimes he could force a padlock apart, but he usually only came across them when he'd taken smaller containers from his victims.

"It doesn't have one of those loops." Somehow the answer brought a broader smile to Royce's face. Was that pride?

"I was beginning to wonder just what sort of raider you were if you couldn't break at least one lock." Mockery. He should have known.

"Well if you don't know, and I don't know, then we're done."

Royce laughed. "Oh Russell, you are so wrong." He knelt next to the raider and began to spin the dial several times around, tapping a spot on the door next to it. "Put your ear right here."

"Seriously?"

"Seriously. It'd help if we had a stethoscope, but- wait. Grab those plastic cups. We'll cut the bottoms out and it'll be better than nothing."

With the cups prepared, Royce set Redeye up against his designated spot, cup to safe and ear to cup.

"Now, you're going to be listening for a couple of clicks. It'll be faint, but I trust you can hear them." Royce placed his own cup across from Redeye's and began to slowly turn the dial as if putting in the combination. Distracted by his own frustration, Redeye missed the clicks and only realized it when Royce stopped. "Hear that?"

"Uh-"

"Of course not. Listen, Russell. This'll be good for you and all you have to do is have a little bit of patience." Royce set back to work, resetting the dial and trying again. The second go around, Redeye heard the clicks and when he looked up at Royce, he was met with an approving smile. "I told you that you could hear it."

"If you know how to do this, why don't you just do it yourself?"

"'Give a man a fish and he will be hungry again tomorrow; teach him how to fish and he will be richer all his life.' I can and I will do it myself because I can't expect you to get it right on your first try, but everyone needs specialized skills."

"I do plenty of shit real good already." Redeye sulked as Royce shuffled about in one of his bags for a journal and pencil.

"You already do plenty of shit well." He began to draw up a chart in the book without even looking up. "Your ear for music, rather, for sound, is to your advantage here. It doesn't account for your taste but if you really harness your abilities, you can utilize it in a multitude of ways beyond... the radio."

Redeye was dumbstruck. His music was his passion and he never realized just how alive he felt when broadcasting than when Royce had taken it away from him. Now the same man was telling him he had a knack for it?

"What do you want from me?"

Royce looked up from his chart and scanned Redeye up and down and up again. He shrugged. "I want for you to reach your full potential because that means that the business, my business, Nuka World, will reach its full potential and then we'll all be better off because we'll have all the caps any of us could ever want. It's simple, Russell."

With no further argument, the two went back to mapping the clicks from the dial in a process that was surprisingly involved. Redeye had known cracking a safe involved listening for something moving, but he had never known just what a repeated tedious process it could be. He wasn't sure he wanted to retain the glut of information he was being fed, but as he would listen, as the two would have their ears against the same surface, face to face, he began to realize his breathing had changed. Was Royce staring at him? Or was he staring through him and into the space between the molecules that made him?

Under the assumption that there were only three numbers to the combination, one of the most common, Royce compared his graphs to determine the possibilities. After a few attempts, they finally found the arrangement that allowed the safe's handle to turn up and the door to reluctantly loose from the body, creaking on its hinges and rust flaking off.

Inside was their reward. A few photos, note cards of recipes no doubt meant for the preserves that had once been, a gold watch that had one day stopped ticking at 8:32, and a stack of prewar American dollars totaling in the hundreds. A sparse sum for the time according to Royce who took the cash and inhaled deeply from it.

"What a shame. You know, sometimes you get a moron who's dumb enough to cross from coast to coast or maybe word just gets around, but I've heard there's folks in California trying to bring this stuff back into style. It's not going so well."

"It's all useless. Why did we bother?"

"Nonsense." Royce lit one of the bills with his lighter and watched it burn a moment before using it in turn to light a cigarette as the two sat on the dirt floor. "The canned peaches sound absolutely delicious."

"What the hell even are peaches?"

"A fruit, of course. With a big fat seed in the middle." Royce held up his thumb and finger in an O shape and stared through it toward Redeye. "You learned something, right? A lot of things."

"All I learned was that you're full of crock and I should never come out anywhere with you ever again."

"Learning about the people you're with is just as valuable, if not more valuable, than any academics so I'd say you're doing just fine." With the recipe cards, cash, and broken watch all safely stowed into his bag, Royce shut the door of the safe and spun the dial.

"What'd you bother doing that for?"

"Do you remember the combination?"

Redeye scoffed.

"Do you remember the combination?"

"No."

"Good. Crack it."


End file.
